Blaire Van Valkenburgh

TL;DR: The rate of large herbivore decline suggests that ever-larger swaths of the world will soon lack many of the vital ecological services these animals provide, resulting in enormous ecological and social costs.

TL;DR: Examples where mesocarnivores drive community structure and function in roles similar to, or altogether different from, their larger brethren substantiate the need for an assessment of the ecological role of mammalian carnivores beyond an examination of only the largest species.

TL;DR: Results demonstrate that osteological indices are good predictors of locomotor behavior among extant carnivores.

TL;DR: It is argued that energetic constraints and pervasive selection for larger size (Cope's rule) in carnivores lead to dietary specialization (hypercarnivory) and increased vulnerability to extinction and selection for attributes that promoted individual success resulted in progressive evolutionary failure of their clades.

TL;DR: It is clear that the basic pattern of adaptive diversity in dental morphology among coexisting carnivores was established at least 32 million years ago and it appears that interspecific competition for food has acted similarly to produce adaptive divergence among sympatric predators in com- munities that differ widely in time, space, and taxonomic composition.